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What is Debouncing?

Nick Scialli
September 07, 2020

person holding clock

Debouncing is a concept in programming in which you defer the execution of some code after a certain amount of inactivity time.

Let’s say we want to auto-save a user’s work as they type. However, we don’t want to send a save request every single keystroke—this would potentially be very expensive. Instead, we can decide to wait for a few seconds of inactivity and then send a save request.

How to Implement Debouncing

We can use pseudocode to implement debouncing in our “auto-saving” use case. Here’s how that might look if we want to save after two seconds of inactivity.

createDebounceTimer:
  saveTextAfterTwoSeconds

onTextBoxChange:
  cancelTimerIfExists
  setNewTimerWithCurrentText

And we can implement this pretty quickly in HTML/JavaScript.

<body>
  <input id="my-input" />
  <p id="debounced-content"></p>
  <script>
    let debounceTimer;
    const myInput = document.querySelector('#my-input');
    const debouncedContent = document.querySelector('#debounced-content');
    myInput.addEventListener('keydown', function (e) {
      if (debounceTimer) {
        clearTimeout(debounceTimer);
      }
      debounceTimer = setTimeout(function () {
        debouncedContent.innerHTML = e.target.value;
      }, 2000);
    });
  </script>
</body>

Let’s take a peek at this in action!

debouncing hello world

Success, we have implemented debouncing in HTML and JavaScript!

Debounce vs. Throttling

A similar concept you might have heard of is throttling. Throttling is different than debouncing: throttling will perform a task every X seconds, regardless of activity. In JavaScript, you can think of this as using a setInterval that we never clear instead of a setTimeout that we do clear. While implementing throttling is outside the scope of this article, it’s important to keep in mind the difference between these to methods!

Nick Scialli

Nick Scialli is a senior UI engineer at Microsoft.

© 2024 Nick Scialli